ASLEF backs Jeremy (again)

27 July 2016

ASLEF’s executive committee, meeting today, has unanimously endorsed Jeremy Corbyn in his bid to be re-elected leader of the Labour Party.

Mick Whelan, ASLEF’s general secretary, said: ‘We backed Jeremy for leader last year because he offered the party – and the country – a vision of a better Britain. Despite what his critics in the PLP say, Jeremy has led the Labour Party with distinction. Off the back of an unexpected, and debilitating, defeat at the general election last year, he has brought in, or brought back, tens of thousands of new members, activists and supporters who had left the party because of the sell-outs, and triangulation, of the New Labour years, or had never been interested in politics because they felt that Labour only offered the same sort of discredited policies, in the wake of the global financial collapse, as the Tories.

‘We are backing Jeremy again because he believes in the core values and the key aspirations of the Labour Party and proposes to run on a platform, at the next general election, which will excite voters put off by the failed focus group-obsessed machinations of the New Labour years.

‘Jeremy Corbyn has been a breath of fresh air. He has been honest, and he has been decent, and you can’t always say that about our politicians. Harold Wilson famously said, “The Labour Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing” and the Labour Party lost its way when it forgot that. Jeremy is the democratically-elected leader of our party,we believe he will win again, and I wish people would spend less time undermining him and more time turning our collective fire on the Tories.’